2D movies vs. 3D

The thing about 3D movies, I’ve come to learn, is that current editing practices, with many cuts in scenes, doesn’t translate well to a 3D showing.

Imagine a scene in a diner with two characters sitting on opposite sides of a booth. Normally there would be cuts between at least three shots: one with both people, and closeups of each. These cuts come at a rapid clip, often one or more for each line of dialog. With 3D, your eyes have to readjust for every cut, so fewer should be made. Some 3D advocates say to use a few cuts as possible, even down to a single shot for each scene.
I think going that far would end up visually boring (go see a play*), but somewhere in between might be the way of the future.

*: This is not a dig, I love the theatre.

But you must realize that this is the fine art of projection. That is where it is at. Any stereologic audio is direct projected waveform. Similarily, sterovideo is projected holograph. It is truly dimensional.

I was reading a feature some time ago about modern 3D movies using a technique that slowly introduces the changing depth of field between scenes. That is, instead of it the depth changing with the hard-cut, it slowly transitions from one to the next, IIRC.

More likely in cooperation with Hustler. They’re marketing TV’s now as “3D ready”. The idea is to be able to view movies and games in 3D without glasses.

I’ve heard there’s new technology in 3d projection that has spurred the comeback - how does it work?

In a follow up question to my other one - if someone were unable to see a 3d movie properly due to failure of binocular vision, what would they see? Double images of everything? Would it depend on why they couldn’t use binocular vision? If they closed one eye, would they simply see a normal-looking 2d movie since the lens would be polarizing one half of the 3d feeds?

The first stab at 3D was with the colored glasses you’ve seen. They mostly work, but you’re giving up color information, which detracts from the experience. The next attempt was polarized glasses: They were polarized something like ///// \\, so your left eye would see an image at one polarization, and your right eye would see the other. This also worked, and preserved the color, but if you tilted your head even slightly, it’d go all screwey.

You can work around this, too, by using circularly-polarized light instead of linearly-polarized. Instead of using the polarizations “vertical” and “horizontal”, or whatever, you use “clockwise” and “counterclockwise”. The only reason nobody used this in the first place is that nobody could figure out how to mass-produce a disposably-cheap circular polarization filter. Well, they still haven’t actually figured that out, but what they have figured out is how to make a cheap filter that turns circularly-polarized light into linearly-polarized light, and then put that in series with another cheap filter that blocks linearly-polarized light. So now, you retain the color and the ability to tilt your head a little.

As for the “what if you can’t see 3D” question, each of your eyes would be getting a slightly different image, it’s true… But this is also what happens when looking at things in the real world. I can’t imagine why a 3D movie would look any different from reality to such a person. Though, of course, the one-size-fits-none glasses aren’t all that comfortable in themselves, so it’d still be a degradation of the whole experience.

Lots of people don’t put a 3d picture together in their brain due to an ocular or brain impairment of some type. In the real world this just means (I think) that your brain learns to use the input of one eye and you lose stereoscopic vision. I’m wondering what happens in the artificial constraints of a 3d projection setup - I don’t understand the technology that well nor the different reasons for lack of stereoscopic function.

If you were to look at a 3d movie being projected without any 3d depolarization glasses, what would you see?

That’s why I said they’d see whatever they normally see, not what that actually is: I don’t know what the experience is like. But if the brain can ignore input from one eye for a real scene, then it could also ignore input from one eye through polarizing glasses.

Without the glasses at all, you’d see a ghostly double image on the screen. You could probably still follow the movie, especially the parts that are close to the plane of the screen, but it’d look bad.

Aha. So it sounds like anyone (whether they have functioning stereoscopic vision or not) would, while wearing glasses and closing one eye, essentially see the equivelant of the 2d version of the movie.

I guess I’ll just go find out, but I was curious as to how it would work technically. I actually don’t know if I have stereoscopic vision or not - which might sound weird, but how would you actually know without ever having had it to lose? You learn to use other depth cues to compensate if you don’t have it.

The movie people are for the most part good with this - 3D seems to work best with CGI movies. Although they sometimes miss the mark - only part of a movie is weird (Harry Potter) and old school red blue 3D is really weird (Spy Kids 3D)- and if any movie should have been 3D but wasn’t it’s AstroBoy, what’s up with that! And delayed 3D is annoying- the 3D version should be released at the same time as 2D. Star Trek should have been 3D, it was definitely better in IMAX.

In general works best with visually oriented action movies, which tend to be the CGI animated sort but don’t have to be. There’s some other X-factor. 3D really worked well with and enhanced Monsters vs Aliens whereas with other CGi animated it was often OK but not amazing.

I’m thinking 3D will be a great with with Avatar, and from one review I read, it really takes advantage in a non gimmicky way.

The problem with 3D movies has been twofold – setting up shots that properly take advantage of the 3D effect, and technically executing them. CGI is good for this because it lets you do both much more easily than Real Life, and it’s easier to fix if it doesn’t work out well.

I persoinally think that 3D ought to be a great addition to cinema, and can, in principle, really add something to scenes – even non-action-adventure ones. In my opinion, the greatest 3D scene so far has been the “murder” scene in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder.

The best overall 3D movie was The Creature from the Black Lagoon. That film had naturally-occurring perfect “3D moments” – situations where you had a lot of relatively close by things with plenty of parallax so that you saw the 3D effect. That happened because a lot of scenes were shot underwater in very clear water, so you could see the different planes formed by bubbles, floating sediment, plants, and the occasional Creature.

Bad 3D happens when things are so far away that there’s no parallax (so no 3D) or when the 3D is all gimmickry – like the “paddleball” sequence in House of Wax, or virtually the entire movie Comin’ at You.

I thought the Robert Zemeckis films Beowulf , Polar Express and A Christmas Carol did good things with 3D (and on other counts as well). I could easily see serious movies using 3D to good advantage – Imagine scenes like the stone tunnel at the end of The Third Man in 3D. Or the raid on Aqaba in Lawrence of Arabia. And, as far as action-adventure goes, Star Wars would’ve been great in 3D – the jump to lightspeed, Princess Leia’s hologram really being 3D, the Death Star Trench sequence, and the final explosion.

Incidentally, red/green anaglyph isn’t “old style” 3D. Those 1950s movies were released in Polaroid format in their initial release in the Big Cities, and the color films in 3D looked a lot better in it. They only released them in anaglyphic format later because it didn’t require special equipment for projection or a special polarization-retaining screen – you could just project the anaglyphic film with an ordinary projector, use an ordinary screen, and simply hand out red-and-green glasses. It worked really well with nominally black and white movies like It Came from Outer Space, and even pretty well with color films (although the color got a little weird).

Christmas Carol in 3d was excellent. I felt like it really used 3d well.

Ebert put it best. “Zemekis uses 3D. He doesn’t let it use him.”

My son, who is in his early twenties, tells me he can’t see the 3-D effect in the movies. He does go to 3-D movies that he wants to see and tells me that there is no “double image”, it just looks like a normal movie. He wears the glasses.

He does regularly visit an opthamologist for eye exams, and wears prescription glasses, but it has nothing to do with his 3-D “blindness.” The eye doctor has never diagnosed him with anything that would cause his problem with a 3-D experience. He has never complained about distance or depth perception issues in his normal day to day activities.

I have done graduate work in the study of human perception, but don’t recall having come across a “central” disturbance related to this inability to see 3-D in the movies. Obviously, if one eye doesn’t move or position correctly (as in “lazy eye” perhaps), then the brain won’t receive the two discordant views at the proper relationship so as to fuse the two views correctly.

In my son’s case, as I said before, there has been no diagnosis indicating a “periperheral” (at the eye level) cause for his problem with 3-D viewing.

I wonder if maybe his brain needs a different amount of separation of the two views than the 3-D glasses provide? The only way to find out would be to have some optical mechanism that can vary the image provided to the two eyes and see whether perhaps MORE of a difference between the two views might result in the brain fusing the two views together to produce the 3-D experience others have. Or, perhaps it would take LESS of a difference between the two views to create the 3-D fusion. At this time, I am not sure if such a device exists, but it should be possible to construct one.

I would like to hear from others who might have this problem and also if anyone knows of any studies or explanations and where to find this info.